The Witness (Badge of Honor 4)

Evans, the elderly, white-haired black butler (who, with his wife had been in the house when Miss Martha had been born, and when both of her parents had died), came out of the house.

“Good evening, Captain,” he said. “I believe Miss Martha’s upstairs.”

“Thank you,” Pekach said.

As Pekach went into the house, Evans got behind the wheel of the unmarked car and drove it to the four-car garage, once a stable, a hundred yards from the house.

There was a downstairs sitting room in the house, and an upstairs sitting room. Martha had gotten into the habit of greeting him upstairs with a dri

nk, and some hors d’oeuvres in the upstairs sitting room.

He would have a drink, or sometimes two, and then he would take a shower. Sometimes he would dress after his shower, and they would have another drink and watch the news on television, and then go for dinner, either out or here in the house. And sometimes he would have his shower and he would not get dressed, because Martha had somehow let him know that she would really rather fool around than watch the news on television.

Tonight, obviously, there would be no fooling around. At least not now, if probably later. Martha, when she greeted him with a glass dark with Old Bushmill’s and a kiss that was at once decorous and exciting, was dressed to go out. She had on a simple black dress, a double string of pearls, each the size of a pencil eraser, and a diamond and ruby pin in the shape of a pheasant.

“Precious,” she said, “I asked Evans to lay out your blazer and gray slacks. I thought you would want to look more or less official, but we’re going out for dinner, and I know you don’t like to do that in uniform, and the blazer-with-the-police-buttons seemed to be a nice compromise. All right?”

He had called Martha early in the morning, to tell her that Matt Payne, thank God, was not seriously injured. He knew that she would have heard of the shooting, and would be concerned on two levels, first that it was a cop with whom he worked, and second, perhaps more important, that Matt was the son of her lawyer. He told her that he would be a little late getting home; he wanted to put in an appearance at Frankford Hospital.

“I’d like to go too, if that would be all right,” she said.

He had hesitated. He could think of no good reason why she should not go to see Payne. After all, Payne’s father was her lawyer, and they probably more or less knew each other, but he suspected that Martha was at least as interested in appearing as Dave Pekach’s very good lady friend as she was in offering her sympathy to Matt Payne.

He had tried from the beginning, and so far successfully, to keep Martha away from his brother officers. Every sonofabitch and his brother in the Police Department seemed to think his relationship with the rich old maid from Chestnut Hill was as funny as a rubber crutch.

Martha, he knew, had sensed that he was keeping their personal life very much separate from his professional life. One of the astonishing things about their relationship was that he knew what she was thinking. The flip side of that was that she knew what he was thinking too.

He had hesitated, and lost.

“Precious, if that would in any way be embarrassing to you, just forget it.”

“Don’t be silly. How could it be embarrassing? I’ll come by the house right from work and pick you up.”

“All right, if you think it would be all right,” Martha had said, her pleased tone of voice telling him he had really had no choice. “And then we’ll go out for dinner afterward? Seafood?”

“Seafood sounds fine,” he had said.

He had spent a good deal of time during the day considering his relationship with Martha, finally concluding that while the way things were was fine, things could not go along much longer unchanged.

Sometimes, he felt like a gigolo, the way she was always giving him things. It wasn’t, he managed to convince himself, that he had fallen for her because she was rich, but that didn’t make her just another woman. There was no getting away from the fact that she was a rich woman.

How could he feel like a man when she probably spent more money on fuel oil and having the grass cut at her house than he made?

But when he was with her, like now, he could not imagine life without her.

Jesus, just being around her makes me feel good!

“Was that all right, precious, having Evans lay out your blazer?”

“Fine,” Captain David Pekach said, putting his arm around Miss Martha Peebles and kissing her again.

“Precious, behave,” she said, when he dropped his hand to her buttock. “We don’t have time.”

The blazer to which she referred was originally the property of her father.

When Evans and his wife (after an initial three- or four-week period during which their behavior had been more like that of concerned parents rather than servants) had finally decided that Dave Pekach was going to be good for Miss Martha, they had turned to being what they genuinely believed to be helpful and constructive.

Dave Pekach now had an extensive wardrobe, formerly the property of the late Alexander Peebles. No one had asked him if he wanted it, or would even be willing to wear what he had at first thought of as a dead man’s clothes. It had been presented as a fait accompli. Evans had taken four suits, half a dozen sports coats, a dozen pairs of trousers, and the measurements Martha had made of the new uniform Dave had given himself as a present for making captain to an Italian custom tailor on Chestnut Street.